Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1276571
MIND OVER MATTER Q U A R T E R B A C K S As he gets set for his second season as PSU's starting quarterback, Sean Clifford has been working to sharpen his mental approach, hopeful that it will lead to a big junior year O ne of the challenges of playing quarterback, possibly the most heavily scrutinized position in all of sports, is knowing just how much bravado to show. You want to be confident but not over- confident, daring but not reckless, charismatic but not egotistical. Since taking over as Penn State's starter last summer, Sean Clifford has assiduously stayed on the right side of all those lines. So when he showed up for a recent Zoom call with reporters wearing a hoodie bearing the word "Gunslinger" in bright white lettering, there were ques- tions. The sweatshirt featured some other words, too: a pronunciation guide followed by a definition, as if the whole thing had been lifted from a dictionary. A gun- slinger, according to the text, is a "quarterback who plays the position in an aggressive, surgical manner." That's a broadly accurate description of Clifford's first season in charge of the Nittany Lions' offense, but his sartorial choices still managed to get everyone's attention. "I actually did not mean to wear this for this meeting," he admitted. "I saw it on an Instagram ad and I was like, 'That's me, I've got to have that.' That's where I got it, and it gives you the definition. I think it's a cool sweat- shirt." Penn State will be looking for Clifford to live up to his hoodie this fall, and he's been doing everything possible to make that happen, despite having lost invaluable practice reps and bonding mo- ments with this teammates during the spring and early summer. His efforts have involved a fair bit of improvisation. Stuck at home following the onset of the pan- demic, he bought a whiteboard to diagram plays and took up chess as a sort of mind- sharpening exercise. It will probably never be possible to quantify how much of a difference those things have made, but every little bit of preparation helps. And any- way, he had a lot of time on his hands before players re- ported to campus in June. "There was no reason not to," he said. As a redshirt sophomore last year, Clifford finished fourth in the Big Ten in total offense, averaging 257.4 yards per game. He started out hot but cooled off in the final month of the regular season before being knocked out in the third quarter of Penn State's matchup with Ohio State. Clifford had to watch the remainder of that game from the sideline, and he sat out the regular-sea- son finale vs. Rutgers the following week. Coming off the Cotton Bowl, a game in which he took a backseat to the running backs, Clifford seemed headed for a productive off-season. Unlike the previous year, when he was abruptly promoted to the starting spot fol- lowing Tommy Stevens' surprise transfer, there was no major shift in the order of the depth chart, and the off- season had seemed to offer Clifford a chance to consol- idate the gains he made in 2019 while adapting to the changes that new offensive coordinator Kirk Ciarrocca had implemented following his arrival from Minnesota. It was supposed to be a period of steady behind-the- scenes development. But for obvious reasons, that was not the case. Instead of spending his off-season in State College, Clifford quarantined back home in Cincinnati. Instead of learning Ciarrocca's offense on the practice field, he had to make do with Zoom meetings, home study sessions and occasional quizzes. In- stead of throwing to his receivers, he | STRONG DEBUT Clifford finished fourth in the Big Ten in total of- fense last season, averaging 257.4 yards per game in his 12 starts. Photo by Steve Manuel